Tuesday, October 21, 2008

FCC Comes Down On Comcast For P2P Blocking

"Would you be OK with the post office opening your mail, deciding they didn't want to bother delivering it, and hiding that fact by sending it back to you stamped "address unknown - return to sender,"? said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin in a statement."

So that is what our argument is with the web. IP checking and banning, editing and deleting of comments [i]openly solicited from the public[/i] is completely unethical. this goes for bloggers too, who are requesting responses from the public.

When you put up a pubic board and ask the public to come in and comment, you don't have any business "moderating" that content. Such behavior on the part of administrators is an act of Anti-Trust.

We have not even scratched the surface of the issues that need to be confronted. When members join here on this forum, we confront all of these bogus ideas that have become a false standard for community organization.

Comcast has been under attack in the last year for reportedly jamming traffic of its high-speed Internet subscribers who share files online, specifically involving peer-to-peer provider BitTorrent. "Comcast has an anticompetitive motive to interfere with customers' use of peer-to-peer applications," said the FCC in a statement. "Such applications, including those relying on BitTorrent, provide Internet users with the opportunity to view high-quality video that they might otherwise watch (and pay for) on cable television. Such video distribution poses a potential competitive threat to Comcast's video-on-demand ("VOD") service. Indeed, Comcast may have interfered with up to three-quarters of all peer-to-peer connections in certain communities."

The FCC did not impose fines against Comcast but said the company needs to come up with a compliance plan describing how it intends to stop "these discriminatory management practices by the end of the year."

Did I see the word "compliance" in that paragraph? Right. The administrators of communities must comply. Not only on this issue but on a multitude of other issues involving manipulation of data that they openly solicited from the public in good faith. The users supply that data and therefore the adms. must comply with the decisions of the users.